


It Pours

by JazzRaft



Series: Dark at Night [31]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-04
Packaged: 2019-06-21 18:45:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15564114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: When it rains in Duscae, damn does it pour. And with nowhere else to go, Nyx waits out another storm that's brewing behind Noct's eyes.





	It Pours

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wrathofscribbles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wrathofscribbles/gifts).



> filled for a prompt [over here](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/176601780662/hullooooooooooooooooooooo-there-i-see-your)

“Are you sure you want to leave with the rain like this?”

Nyx pointed the question at Noct’s back, watching the prince’s fist tighten around the tent flap as if he could command the Fulgurian to cease His squalling before the Covenant bid him permission to make Him. They still had a long way to go before then, though.

Therein laid Noct’s frustration, Nyx knew. Time was bearing down upon them like a great wave cresting off the shore of the sea. It felt like the hands of the clock were wheeling in an infinite loop, never stopping in their manic circuit for them to catch up, forwarded by an engineer none of them fully understood.

“It’s just water,” Noctis growled, coiled to pounce at the very storm clouds, as if he could subdue them with his bared paws alone. “We should go now before it gets worse.”

“I think this _is_ worse, little king.”

Nyx had been beyond the Wall enough times to know a gale from a drizzle. He knew which rains to brave and which ones demanded the respect to go ahead of him. Storms like this one, ones that made the tent shrink around them and drove the volume of their voices higher than polite company might have preferred; those storms demanded a bowed head and a “wait your turn.”

Nyx had stepped out earlier in the morning, his only indicator of dawn being the timestamp on his phone. The clouds bruised the sky as black as any night, the blotted light of the sun leaking in dim through the sliver of space where the tent flaps met. Noctis had still been asleep, his slumbering expression one of frets and frustration, tossing and turning next to Nyx all through the night. He’d exhausted himself without ever opening his eyes, plagued by thoughts as tempestuous as the storm and bullied by the bullets of rain firing against their canvas shelter on all sides.

He’d woken up angry, and Nyx couldn’t blame him. He didn’t take his gruff dismissals of morning pleasantries personally, instead retreating to his menial tasks of scouting the haven and preparing breakfast and calling Ignis back at the motel to let him know they hadn’t drowned under the weight of the rain.

_Yes,_ he had enough curatives to last them the rest of the storm should they run into trouble. _No,_ they hadn’t run into any trouble. How was the car doing? Did he need them to go on any hunts before they came back? _No_ , he won’t look for trouble where he doesn’t need to find it. _No_ , he hadn’t been defiling the Crown Prince in the backwoods of Duscae without Ignis there to enforce the law of public decency… _Much._

In the time it took Nyx to cover all the basics and determine from the blast of wind that nearly sent him careening off the side of the haven that they weren’t going anywhere today, Noct’s morning mood had shifted from annoyed to sullen to impatient to stir crazy.

“We can make it,” Noctis insisted.

His jaw set in that unilateral determination to do something against all advice to the contrary. Nyx knew that look drove Ignis nuts, ticking off one more day of his life every time Noctis powered forward before he could finish a sentence to steer him otherwise. Sometimes, it was just funny – most times, they came out of Noct’s roadside scraps just fine. Other times, when an MT carrier dropped something at the last minute that none of them had foreseen, it was a little less funny when they were limping back to camp half-bloodied and broken.

It wasn’t usually Nyx’s call to decide which was which. He always had an overseer, always had someone else calling the shots, making the decisions, gambling with lives that were not their own from behind a war table. Didn’t mean he always listened. When Drautos called him in for disciplinary actions and the exasperated spill of “why” filled the office like oil, Nyx was honest. He just knew better, _sir._

“We can wait,” Nyx argued, sitting back on his sleeping bag and putting on a show of making himself comfortable.

Noctis flitted a glare back at him before it registered that Nyx wasn’t just blowing smoke up his ass. He wasn’t going to follow him… That was a new one for Noct, out here in the savage wilds of war-torn Lucis where lone wolves didn’t last one foot outside of their packs.

“No. We can’t.”

Noct’s words were short, hard, a fledgling edge to them that was slowly being tempered the more steps they fell behind Niflheim, the more close calls they barely escaped, the more the Empire seemed to know what they were planning long before they ever did. It was an edge that Nyx was struggling to wield, unused to this tension in Noct, sitting like a powder keg with a long burning fuse waiting to explode.

“No one’s going anywhere in this, Noct,” Nyx reasoned, resting one arm on his knee. “Airships are grounded, roads are closed, there’s flooding all over the place. There’s nowhere the Empire can go that we could reach before them. The guy’s will be fine…”

“I’m not worried about them.”

Of course not, they weren’t the ones stuck with canned campfire food and wet socks in the middle of nowhere. The boys had central heating and dry blankets and Ignis to cast his magic in the beaten down little kitchen, electricity and plumbing and games on Prompto’s phone while Cindy tinkered on the Regalia and they awaited her call to pick it up.

They were fine. It was Noctis who Nyx was worried about.

A loud rip of thunder split open overhead, making the whole tent shake. It was as if Titan had torn a mountain in two, wrathful and without remorse. It reminded Nyx of the thunderbirds from back home, the snap of wings coming down from the canyons used to make his ears ring. The thunderclap made Noctis flinch back from the tent flap, scaring out any ideas of risking the storm’s ire by setting foot beneath the rain.

Noctis swore and sat back, half leaned away from Nyx as the light of his phone brightened the lantern lit gloom of the tent. Weather reports, Nyx saw over his shoulder, though the predictions of businessmen pretending to be oracles didn’t concern him. It was the knots in Noct’s neck, the elastic tension in his arms with every swipe over the screen. It was the way he stiffened when Nyx reached out and touched him, hand closing around the narrow clench of the prince’s shoulder.

“What are you worried about, then?”

Noctis didn’t relent for a moment, the tension recoiling from Nyx’s invitation to confession like a plague from fire. For a while, Noctis just stared at the forecast, and the rain was so loud that Nyx could barely hear him when he spoke. Nyx squeezed his shoulder, tugging gently so Noctis turned to him. He gave Nyx a miserable look, all hard lines restrained from snapping and forcing the soft features of his face to age faster than he ever should. His voice was a wheeze, like a pinhole puncture in a car tire.

“Everything. All of it. I don’t even know where to start.”

“We’ve got time.”

Noctis shook his head to disagree, determined to be crushed beneath the riot march of time. Nyx slipped his hand down his arm to hold his hand, deliberately slow and careful with the movement, lest he shatter all those delicate dams that Noctis had constructed for himself to be strong enough to stand on. He wasn’t aiming for a flood, just a leak. A trickle to start, then a stream, then a river. He wanted it to come steady. All at once and they both wouldn’t be ready to swim.

As Nyx expected, it started with Noct’s father. Then it was the city, then it was Lunafreya, then it was the Astrals and the Empire and the chancellor and the Crown. It was the scars on Nyx’s arm and the ghosts he didn’t know Noct could hear him fighting back at night. By the end of it all, the storm had settled into a steady purr around them, the tearing winds and braggart blasts of thunder crawling into a murmur on the horizon. The raindrops still fell heavy on the roof of the tent, a sag in the middle warning Nyx to go out and dump the bowl of rain that had collected before it caved the whole structure in on top of them.

It could wait. They could wait. The world could wait for just one more day.

Noct could not. He was drained by the end of his flood of unsaid anxieties and secret, selfish desires. His voice was hoarse, his eyes were red, and his limbs fell loosely from his body when he leaned it against Nyx’s at whatever point in the deluge had weakened him the most.

“I know I’m supposed to be the one in charge,” Noctis said, wincing and nursing a hand along his throat when the words scraped past. “But I have no idea what I’m supposed to do.”

“You’re not alone there.”

Noctis sighed through his nose because his throat hurt too much to exhale. His hand was doing nothing for it, but the pressure seemed to comfort him, nevertheless, closing his eyes and melding himself back against Nyx’s body, warmed from the dampness clamping down on them from the carved stone below. Nyx lifted an arm around him, looping Noctis to his side and coaxing his hand away to cover his throat with his own, nursing delicate circles along the chords of his throat that he’d worn ragged in the hours that he’d talked.

Noctis made small, tentative noises where Nyx pressed on the rawest points, tilting the back of his head against Nyx’s shoulder. This was better. This was what Nyx knew. This was the Noctis he knew how to hold, not the sharp, hasty shadow thirsty for blood in the glare of the storm.

Nyx’s thumb followed a slow circuit up to the corner of Noct’s jaw, then pushed, drawing his head back farther for Nyx to dip in for a kiss. Awkward at the odd angle, but something he knew Noct needed. The tactile reminder that he wasn’t alone, that he wasn’t the only one beaten and berated by the storm clouds bearing down on them from all sides. That he was loved no matter what mistakes he made in the days to come.

Noctis mewled into his mouth, holding Nyx’s wrist to keep his hand around his throat and sinking back against his chest for him to reach his kiss in deeper. The brick and mortar of his worries was broken down at his feet, washed away with the rain, leaving him as soft and sensitive as new shoots of grass to tread underfoot. Just for now, for that one stretch of time under the dawn before the world awoke, he was safe to soak up that wash of fresh sunlight after a storm.

“I know what you can do,” Nyx teased, whispering against an urgent press of lips as Noctis tried to twist further onto his lap.

“Tell me.”

Noct’s eyes darkened, his voice rough with more than overuse as he pressed his neck into Nyx’s grasp. Nyx smiled wearily, but always obliging. It was better than doing nothing. It was better than stewing in that vacant feeling of unknowing, after the clouds passed into the horizon. It was better than watching that blackness escape after leaving them to dry off the mess.

It was better, Nyx thought, as he nursed Noct down to the sleeping bags on kisses and tender touches on his throat, than not having the answers at all.


End file.
